Exhaustion

After the war, my father used the GI Bill to attend Northwestern at night. With one child already born and a second soon to follow, he was hungry for advancement beyond the dead-end job he'd returned to in credit and collections.

The picture here was taken on the day of his graduation. You may not notice it, but he's exhausted. Within months, he will contract pneumonia and be confined to a ward at Heinz Hospital for about three weeks.

All that strain, those endless nights in the Army, being mystified by Japanese particles, sight-reading Kanji under a single dim bulb. Then boom! the war ends, and he comes home to a budding family, plus forty hours a week at Spiegel, not to mention a huge course load at Northwestern, so intense, in fact, he manages to obtain his degree in little more than two years.

So look at those eyes a moment. They may be exhausted, even ready for quarantine ... but there's something else happening as well. The young man of promise has grown up. He is a student no more.

For more than fifty years, the books he used at NU sat on our book shelves, gathering dust next to one or two of his old Japanese textbooks. I think he was prouder of the shelves, which he made himself, than of the books. It was like he kept the books around as yellowing testimonials to something he didn't want to forget, but would never look at again. I was the only one who ever pulled them down. Their sturdy bindings touched me somehow, the old-fashioned red and blue cloth covers part of a world far removed from our suburban tract home, with our perfectly cut lawn and our sump-pump in the basement. One of the books from Northwestern was by a disciple of S.J. Hayakawa, a Semantics text that seemed to me (I was in high school by this time) the sort of mysterious esoterica about which Time magazine would gush and call "fascinating" and "provocative".

"Oh, it was pretty good," my dad said when I asked him about it, but his flat tone indicated that it was not "fascinating" or "provocative" in his mind, not the way Paul Richards managing style was "fascinating", say.

Over time, he came to strip himself of anything that wasn't essential to this post-war life he'd carved out. Make no mistake: he wasn't a poseur, an egghead pretending to fit in. He really loved being a suburban father, a Little League manager, an usher at church. Hey, he could dip and wield and make the collection basket dance like Baryshnikov. Eventually he would become president of the Holy Name society, captain of his bowling team, a man of parts and substance.

And yet there was this very different John once, a young man with a stratospheric IQ and a mastery of languages and a Phi Beta Kappa grade point. His sons never really knew this John. They only knew the easy chair John who quizzed them before a Latin test or built a desk out of orange crates and an old door. Amongst themselves, they sometimes marvelled at this other, earlier John, but no amount of wishing on their part would ever bring him back. Indeed this picture may well represent his last known sighting.